The Week of Klopp: A Fan's Account

The Week of Klopp: A Fan's Account

Jurgen Klopp is at Anfield. Jurgen Klopp is the Liverpool manager. Jurgen Klopp is ours. If you do not believe it, do keep repeating it until you believe it.

Every club who changes their manager during the season hope for something, which is now more commonly termed as the ‘honey moon effect’ or ‘manager bounce’. New manager brings in fresh ideas, the players want to impress the new manager, there generally are better performances. But this piece is not about that at all. This piece is going to try and chronicle the euphoria amongst the Liverpool fans this week until the day ended on Friday. Hence this piece might be a bit more personal in nature, but hope that it is as enjoyable as it is usually.

Right from the moment that Klopp was linked to us strongly, thanks to Graeme Kelly in no small part, it has been a struggle to pass every hour. Most of us turned up at work, but no work actually happened. Every waking minute was passed in either refreshing Twitter or checking the innumerable whatsapp groups one was part of, to see if anyone had any new information.

The malaise just spread once there was more confirmation that it was indeed Herr Klopp, as it was no longer a question of ‘if’ but a question of ‘when’. Wednesday arrived with a fresh hope that this was going to be the day. I was for some reason convinced that the announcement was reserved for Wednesday and had made all preparations accordingly. What I under-estimated was the fact that ‘Good things come to those who wait’.

So, the wait continued. The Anfield Index WhatsApp groups had members from various countries and time-zones. What was constant though was the first question on their minds and lips post a disturbed slumber. Morning ablutions could wait,but the question could not

Has it been announced yet ? No? Okay, Let me go back to sleep

The reality was everyone was tottering from a disturbed sleeping pattern the whole week, and there was no way one could go back to sleep and risk missing the announcement. This was as close to an ‘I was there’ moment as it could get.

So every waking hour, the question remained the same, and unfortunately so was the answer. To put our minds out of this, lots of us got into doing podcasts as a necessary diversion. What happened in those podcasts were stuff never seen before. Every podcast literally had a chant or a song on Jurgen Klopp. Harinder Singh, from the Desi Podcast came up with a very interesting character profile of the new manager, which only left the listeners salivating for more. From Monday to Thursday, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity was in full force; every minute felt like an hour. There were only so many videos on Klopp to check out on Youtube and other snippets on Twitter. The wait was getting unbearable.

Then the floodgates opened late on Thursday when the announcement was made. The wait was over, the real delirium was about to kick-start. If one thought that we had seen enough already, the LFC fans showed their A-game online. Every second tweet had some form of ‘Klopp’ on it. Klopp was omni-present , in the form of imagery, hash-tags, puns etc. Klopp-mas had arrived early.

35000 people tracked Klopp’s journey from Germany to England. 35000 people who had stopped doing whatever they were doing (i.e. refreshing Twitter) and switched to flightradar.com . Once he landed, it was real, more real than it was before. The Klopp carnival had kicked off in full force. Media coverage, Klopp dopple-gangers , real time tracking of his activities, name it and it happened. Fans knew where he had dinner, whom he had dinner with, had he changed clothes etc. (Okay, the last bit is fiction)

Friday was all about re-tweeting his quotes, downloading the interview and the press conference and seeing it 100 times over at the bare minimum. Laughing with him, nodding our collective heads with him . The day ended in absolute contrast to how the week had commenced. The confusion was replaced by clarity. The stagnation was replaced by clarity of thought process.

Srikanth is a writer whose articles mainly deal with tactics or stats. A major fan of Torres/Henderson/Markovic, he is also the host of the Anfield Index Global Podcast and a regular guest on the Anfield Index Indian Podcast.